Council representative Danny Thompson: prevaricator extraordinaire

(Greensboro, NC) Yesterday, I posted a file from the public library that I explained logged 500 hits from websites that the bandwidth shaping software identified as porn. Last night, Danny Thompson misrepresented my findings to the public during the city council meeting.

In the post, I asked readers to look at the file and see two things for themselves:

1. Many items flagged as porn are not porn at all.
2. Each counted item does not represent a web page. These logs also count images, styling files, script files and other elements that combine to compose a single web page. Each item is a hit. Hits are what are counted, not websites. There were 500 hits.

I did not think I could make it any more clear or convincing. As I wrote:

"It should be comprehensible to the rational mind that these are not 500 'visits' or even 'pages.'...It shows why it is disingenuous to report these items as counting 'porn site visits.'"

So what does Internet filter advocate and at-large City Council representative Danny Thompson do? At last night's council meeting, he refers to this blogger and announces that the information I requested* and evaluated reports the very thing I explained it did not report, his remarks conforming to what I said is disingenuous.

Thompson: "From twelve thirty to eight thirty P.M. I understand there was about 500 inappropriate or pornographic websites on August the twenty-third that Cymphonix had counted."

No. Wrong. There were not 500 websites. That is what I explained there were not. There were 500 hits (and many of those were not even to porn sites). As the library has explained, as I have explained and as Sue Polinsky has explained, hits do not equate to websites and interchanging them reveals the kind of ignorance that disqualifies one from claiming knowledge of the issue or it is the kind of prevarication that disqualifies one from elected office.

Thompson waves a stack of library incident reports.

Previously, Thompson waved a stack of nearly 200 incident reports from the library at a council meeting and implied that a majority of them were for viewing porn or inappropriate web sites when, in fact, only twenty-one were. Subsequently, somebody misrepresented the findings of another report from the library before it became public to Tony Wilkins who transcribed the mistaken information to his blog, crediting it to anonymous sources. Now there is this third misrepresentation.

If Thompson is unconcerned with establishing a reputation as a prevaricator, that is his business, but when he takes the careful fact-based analysis of this blogger and misrepresents it to the public, that is downright contemptuous -- of me and the public he represents. It is sinister and unworthy of an elected official.

[* Thompson also misstated what I had requested in my records request: Thompson said, "He asked how many web sites were, inappropriate websites, were attempted in one day." No, I did not ask for that, I asked for log files. But it helps Thompson to set up his deception by saying I had asked for what he is going to wrongly say the record reports, as if he's thinking, "I want to say this reports the number of websites, so I'll say that is what Roch asked for even though it is not."]